Freelancing vs. Becoming an Affiliate Marketer

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is affiliate marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you start generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.